Little evidence exists that firms index executive compensation to remove the influence of marketwide factors. We argue that executives can, in principle, replicate such indexation in their private portfolios. In support, we find that market risk has little effect on the use of stock-based pay...

Dissatisfaction with traditional accounting-based performance measures has spawned a number of alternatives, of which Economic Value Added (EVA) is clearly the most prominent. How can we tell which performance measures best capture managerial contributions to value? There is currently a heated...

Proponents of EVA and related 'shareholder value' measures intend to replace earnings and to supplement stock returns by including their own measures in managerial compensation schemes. Stern Stewart's EVA appears to be the most widely recognized measure. However, there are not very many firms...

Academics have long argued that incentive contracts for executives should be indexed to remove the influence of exogenous market factors. Little evidence has been found that firms engage in such practices, also termed 'relative performance evaluation'. We argue that firms may not gainmuch by...

Employee stock options represent a significant potential source of dilution for many shareholders. It is well known that reported earnings tend to understate the associated costs, but an efficient stock market will show no such bias. If by contrast stock prices underestimate the future costs...

The valuation of illiquid or non-marketable assets is complicated by the fact that the discount rate cannot be computed by using the risk attributes of the asset along with market parameters. Rather, individual attitudes toward risk affect the discount rate. Some recent research has avoided this...

Principal-agent theory suggests that a manager should be paid relative to a benchmark that captures the effect of market or sector performance on the firm's own performance. Recently, it has been argued that we do not observe such indexation in the data because executives can set pay in their...